Using Outsourcing To Succeed In Your Business
My first few years of outsourcing experience
I’ll tell a story about the challenges I had in outsourcing
I was introduced to outsourcing and India about 5 years ago while I was still in university. I was actually building a small hosting company at the time, and an independent music site. I didn’t really have money so I thought about a grass roots alternative of building my site and providing 24/7 support. The first company I was introduced to promised full 24/7 chats and ticket support. When I had few clients, I have to say that the experience was decent. It gave me my beer money and provided me with good amount of experience. Once I ended up in university, I got new funding and started growing my company, and then my support needs had to change. My first challenge was that I did not have a dynamic team. They didn’t learn my server and were supporting it like any others. I absolutely needed a dedicated staff that would work solely on my servers and get to know them. I went to a few of my suppliers in India and started fiercely negotiating on dedicated staff. One of my suppliers accepted such low terms that I couldn’t believe it. My supplier told me that he has doing it to build relationships and improve reputation. Although I didn’t believe I went with it anyways, because the price was simply to hard to say no. The truth is, hosting is a very competitive market and it was necessary for me to keep the price low. I started hiring more and more people yet the efficiency did not grow proportionally to the people I hired. My attitude in the beginning was simple, the prices are so low in India that I can hire 6 people at the price of one person and even if they work at 50% efficiency you can’t go wrong with that. Yet it seemed a bit too much. Unfortunately after awhile, I had discovered many problems. First of all the supplier which gave me the exceptional deal had been dishonest with me, and was double or even triple billing me for one staff who was acting as three characters. Oh boy the few guys were so tired and even if they liked me they really did not like the situation. Oh well I said, I guess the only way to do this thing is open my own office and get my own dedicated staff. I went to India and that’s what I did. Once this was all established and I got over all the hefty fees of opening an office things got better, still I gave my manager at the time the job to supervise them. At this moment the truth was that I wanted to supervise them myself, but I was not an engineer and I got too busy with the growing business. These days I managed to fix things by providing well paid managers that are able to supervise
What did I learn from my first 1 years of outsourcing experience
1) You have to be really careful, when negotiating on human resource. At the end of the day if someone has good skills he has the ability to find a good job and will not be too flexible about his salary. When you are working with suppliers that are willing to negotiate that means that are willing to do it at the expense of honesty or expense of quality.
2) If something is too good it just might be. This is an extension to the first mistake, but it goes beyond salary. When things don’t make sense simply find out why.
3) Get a full time dedicated staff. You need a person who will work with what you have to offer, get to know the strengths and weaknesses of the company and understand your product and your methods.
4) Become a leader to your staff. Continuous communication, motivation and supervision is required from you. Just because it is being done from far does not mean that you can treat your remote staff almost like a real employee
5) Understand your client tasks. Even if you have done everything right at the end of the day it’s really important to understand what you staff is doing. Outsourcing is evaluated more on performance and if you don’t know how to evaluate you staff skills you are very handicapped.
6) Know your supplier. Yes at the end of the day, it does mean probably paying a bit more and dealing with a reputable company that has something to lose.
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